I will endorse the Hebridean wind vane too.  No hassles at all except having to go aft to set the course.  It worked straight out of the box. Mine is built from teak to minimise maintenance. I have installed remote course correction – I use a winchrite rubber pad under the vane head that holds a captured rope loop that leads back to the cockpit. OK in good weather but when boat thrashes around in heavy seas it does not stay fixed in the grove necessitating an unwelcome long trip to the rear!

However I do have an unusual situation steering the boat in the light with the now a year old junk rig! It adds another dimension to the term self steering! It can be slightly frustrating.

An issue affects my boat with about 10 knots of wind on the quarter with full sail up - over 700 square feet.  Speed is about four knots. It happens whether manually on the tiller, on the electronic steering or using the Hebridean.  The sail set dictates the direction the boat is headed and no amount rudder to port or starboard has an effect! Helm is neutral. Steering useless! The issue was never noticed when rigged as a Bermudian sloop. One has to reset the sails and then the course and try again.  It is either that or head off forever in that unwanted direction. It takes a bit of effort play with the sheets, to steer off somewhere else, then set course again.

I have another unusual behaviour. Lashed helm and normally the boat will steer itself quite happily in any direction in light seas and up to moderate winds.  Usually a small touch of the tiller is usually enough to change direction - except on that one course when the sail set takes over.  On the wind steering without assistance requires the rudder to be lashed to lee. However the tiller is very light so hardly can be called lee helm. The wind being light and wanting to keep speed up, I do not try reefing to get a neutral or weather helm. The rudder is large and unbalanced. The keel long and shallow – see my pictures. Most other courses helm is lashed amidship- if not I reef.

I have not lowered centre board to gauge effect on the wayward course when I loose rudder control but in the long run will fiddle with that if critically important not to wander to a new course.

Incidentally the boat is excellent in the light and I rarely need to motor.  In a year of full time sailing I have only a few additional hours on motor!  The junk's ability to set a large sail area certainly helps my fuel budget! By fay the best-rig-with-boat of the many I have owned over the years.

How many other junkies have found the sails find their own not-so-sweet spot that can dictate the slightly different course and steer the boat – but with the rudder having no effect?

LC's Cap Horn installation was as per the instructions provided with one exception. They tell you to install the gear so that the servo blade is vertical. I installed it so that when the boat was level on its waterline the servo blade  raked aft 4 degrees. This was so that when LC was loaded (she goes down in the stern) the blade would not then have a forward rake which leads to instability.

Because LC is a double ender it was the all above deck model. Installation was easy and it looked quite neat. However apart from a few random occurrences it simply never steered the boat both with the old rudder and with the new and very much improved rudder.

As I mentioned before, I've now built myself a Hebridean gear and it works beautifully with minimal fiddling. I'd recommend the Hebridean to anyone but you will probably want to make the modifications that I made to enable remote coarse setting.

More detail of my 'Cape Horn' experience -

In the late 1990's a long time friend of ours bought a centre cockpit Bristol 41 and fitted it out for cruising. As he lived in Ottawa he got the designer Yves Gélinas to install the Cape Horn gear, but by the time they had sail down the St. Lawrence and crossed the Atlantic to south Spain he admitted he couldn't get the gear to steer the boat for more than a few minutes. Joan and I flew down to Spain to spend a few days with them, but our only chance to try out the gear was for about an hour in a near flat calm, with not enough wind to move the heavy boat at 2 kts.

The boat was Med-moored, bows to, so with no dinghy afloat it was not possible to see the geometry of the installation. The steering quadrant output of the gear was inside the lazarette with a cat's cradle of lines and block coupling it to a small axillary quadrant on the head of the rudder stock, with a 2:1 mechanical dis-advantage, before going to a pair of jambing cleats which were the 'engage' method. It looked a theoretical attempt at a totally impractical lash up. When I tried to drive the rudder by swinging the paddle I was horrified to find how difficult it was as the friction was so high, but even worse, the mechanical connection to the large centre cockpit steering wheel could not be disconnected so that when the wheel did start turning with the rudder the flywheel effect took over, and it did not want to stop. It was a disaster area, and I could not see how it would ever work.

In our short time under way, in an effort to see the gear work we motored up to about 6 knots and then stopped the prop so that the paddle was not effected by the prop-wash. I tried to steer the boat by tilting the vane by hand, and it did not work. The paddle would float up to the surface to one side or the other, not necessarily the correct side for the vane inclination, and when the vane was returned to upright the paddle would not go back to vertical. As I was concerned that the coupling to the boat's steering was inefficient I also ran the gear uncoupled from the rudder/ wheel, and again found the paddle would not follow the commands from the vane even when I was controlling it by hand. I did check that the vane/ paddle steering rod was not reversed.

When we returned to the marina I went through the manual and found that the paddle was much longer than recommended when self installed, and from memory had over a metre immersed when vertical. At the time I guessed that the extra volume under water was causing the paddle to float to the surface, but when moving at over 3 kts it still should have followed the vane commands. I measured the paddle chord and balance about its turning axis and found it to be just under 25%, which should have been stable but sensitive.

After we flew home my friend shortened the paddle to the recommended immersed length, but to no effect. The final solution was to remove the gear and return it to Yves in Canada at a significant financial loss to my friend.

My overall impression was that it was a pretty looking gear, but of a theoretical rather than a practical construction for the job. The paddle was of rather narrow chord compared to the accepted successful gears and quite finely balanced and I guessed that this was the reason for the rather small wind vane compared to the established gears. The ratio of the area of the vane to the area of the immersed paddle if trimmed to about 60cm long were probably reasonablel. When seen in practice the coupling from the gear quadrant to the rudder quadrant was a ridiculous mechanical disaster, and the 'back driving' of the wheel to rudder coupling even worse. Even if the gear had steered the boat, the wheel to rudder coupling would have died from excess wear driving the inertia of the wheel, so it would have been a totally impractical set up so live with.

The gear should at least have been able to follow the manual inclinations of the vane at a water speed of 3 – 4 kts when uncoupled from the rudder, but as it couldn't then the thought had to be that the paddle was inclined forward, but even if that was the case the paddle still should have tried to drive to the side it was turned towards. It made no sense.

For the designer/ manufacturer to install it with this result beggars belief. My friend completed a circumnavigation using electric autopilots. He even banged his head on Alan Martienssen's yuloh on Zebedee.

Cheers,  Slieve.

Darren Bos wrote:

Paul, I always thought the Cape Horn had some interesting design features.  I think it fits in David's category 4 (servo pendulum, horizontal power axis).  Do you have any thoughts as to what characteristics prevented the Cape Horn from working while you've had success with the Hebridean?  Could it have been as Slieve describes and the servo blade had forward rake?

If I can jump in:

I saw Paul's Cape Horn before he fitted it, and I had grave doubts then, for the very simple and obvious (to me) reason that the vane was about a quarter of the necessary size. It's a simple matter of physics and mechanics, and it's all been described by John Letcher and Bill Belcher in their books. I don't know why the designer of the Cape Horn thought he could flout the laws of physics in this way, but flout them he did.

My belief is that good vane steering depends on having a vane as large as can sensibly be fitted, so that it needs little angle of incidence to develop enough power to drive the control surface it's connected to (through whatever mechanical advantage or disadvantage there happens to be in the linkage) - and then to put in lots of negative feedback to keep the beast under control.